Roberto Benigni will forgive us for adding a negative word to completely change the title of his film. His masterpiece will remain forever as a perfect example of how one can use such a sad period of world history to make humour and teach a lesson to each and every one of us. It is one of those films which always create mixed emotions, no matter how many times one sees it.

But life, really, is not beautiful, except perhaps for those millionaires who spend their time on a yacht while on the mobile phone buying and selling shares and making money by the minute as they sip champagne and get a sun-tan in the Caribbean.

It was recently calculated that 50 per cent of the world’s wealth is in possession of only two per cent of the world population. Just imagine that. It means that 98 per cent of the world owns the other half. The imbalance is extraordinary.

People say that the most important thing in life is not money, but one’s health. This may be true, but then people who have loads of money can take better care of themselves. They can have a good insurance, they can go to the best hospitals with the best doctors, they can afford to get the best treatment possible and stand a better chance of being cured; they can undergo regular check-ups and possibly prevent illnesses when others do not have the time and the money to do so, and learn that they have a serious illness when it is too late.

Of course, everyone has to kick the bucket some time or another, but doing it in posh surroundings and after having spent a life of luxury is one thing, and doing it in the squalor of a slum after having lived a (shorter) life of depravation is another thing.

These are the two extremes of life. Most of us, in Malta, are comfortable, but this comfort does not come free. It comes with hard work, and at the end of the day there is little to show for it, because what one painstakingly earns in a month of hard work – some of us with two or more jobs – goes away in a jiffy.

Very often, the amount of the bills one receives during any given month by far exceeds what one earns. It is the kind of lifestyle we live today. The amount of money that each one of us spends today, when compared to a few years ago, has grown exponentially.

Just think that there was a time when we did not pay to watch television (except for the yearly licence), when we did not have mobile phones, when we did not have insurances or retirement plans, when we did not have credit cards, when we did not need to send children to football nurseries and dance classes, when our toys were a cheap leather ball and not the most recent handheld game console, when we just switched on the radio to listen to music and not pay to download songs on our iPod.

These are just a few of the “extra” expenses that we have compared to our forefathers. Added to all these money problems – most of which we bring on ourselves – we seem to never have the time to stop as we rush from one thing to another, from one appointment to the next, and probably always arriving late. At the end of the day, all we would want to do is curl up on the sofa, and doze off before the DVD has finished. The weekend comes but it is mostly used on errands we do not have time for during the week, and then our mind is already into the following week, and the respite may be physical, but not mental.

Even our eating habits have changed – just open the freezer and pop the pre-cooked meal in the microwave oven and imagine you are eating a chicken breast when you are tasting plastic.

Life, really, is not beautiful. But then, it’s what each and every one of us makes of it.